I'm the environment editor at Forbes. Before joining Forbes in April 2011, I wrote about all things green and tech as a contributor to The New York Times, a senior editor at Fortune and an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine. I previously was the business editor at the San Jose Mercury News and during the (first) dot-com era served as a senior writer and senior editor at The Industry Standard (RIP).

Alcoa's Self-Cleaning, Smog-Eating Buildings

In the green marketing sweepstakes, Alcoa just may have come up with the catchphrase of the year: Smog-eating buildings.

The aluminum giant on Monday officially unveiled a building panel that it says not only cleans itself but the surrounding air as well.

“Candidly, when you first learn about this technology you think, ‘Wow you’ve got to be kidding,’ ” Craig Belnap, president of Alcoa Architectural Products, said last week when he gave me a sneak preview of the EcoClean panel at the company’s New York City offices in the iconic Lever House.

He holds up a mini-me version of a silver aluminum-skinned building panel like you’d find on any skyscraper in anywhere U.S.A.

It looks utterly unremarkable.

But invisible to the naked eye is a coating of titanium dioxide layered on top of the silver paint. Titanium dioxide particles serve as photo catalysts and when struck by sunlight their electrons become supercharged and interact water molecules in the air. That interaction releases free radicals that break down organic material on the building panel and pollutants such as nitrogen oxide in the surrounding atmosphere.

“It’s really those free radicals that do all the work,” says Belnap. “They’re the components that attack organic material and oxidize them down to harmless compounds that can eventually can be washed away by rain water.”

That’s because when the titanium dioxide interacts with sunlight it also creates what is called a hydrophilic surface that allows water to cascade off the panel in sheets rather than bead up.

Alcoa estimates that its self-cleaning Reynobond with EcoClean panels can cut a building’s maintenance costs by a third to a half.

Then, of course, there’s the green bragging rights that your high-rise is soaking up smog.

Belnap insists that’s no gimmick.

“This does this equate to a tree and if you have 10,000 square feet of surface of Reynobond with EcoClean, it has about the same air cleansing of 80 trees,” he says, adding that independent testing confirmed the panels’ air-cleaning properties.

“It’s actually a significant impact on air quality,” Belnap adds, noting that aluminum panels are installed on some 14 billion square feet of buildings in North America and Europe. “If a fraction of those surfaces use the EcoClean product, it would be the equivalent of planting several million trees.”

Alcoa collaborated with Japan’s Toto on the project. Toto had previously developed titanium dioxide coatings, which covers some 200 million square feet of building surface, mainly in Japan, according to Belnap. The catch was that it had to be applied after the manufacture of the building panel, a labor-intensive and expensive endeavor.

The breakthrough came when Alcoa developed a way to integrate the titanium dioxide coating into a high-speed manufacturing process that applies paint to coils of aluminum.

“Our current research shows it can be applied to all painted surfaces,” says Belnap. “There would be a substantial amount of research and development still to be done to get the kind of durability to cover other kinds of surfaces.”

EcoClean panels will command an estimated 4% to 5% premium over the installed cost of conventional versions, a price Alcoa believes customers will be willing to pay for the long-term return on investment as well as the boost to their brands.

“We think they’ll be great interest in this EcoClean product because many of these companies are exactly the ones that are focused on sustainability,” says Belnap.

Two pilot projects are underway in Europe and North America with customers Alcoa declined to identify.

But Belnap did show off a faux-wood grain-building panel that has caught clients’ interest.

“In Europe we’re using the tag line, ‘How much forest can I build?’ he says. “We’re trying to illustrate that not only does it look like a tree it has some of the function of a tree.”

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What a cool technology! Products that create that “You’ve got to be kidding me” response are exactly what corporate sustainability is all about. Working to solve environmental problems is going to keep leading to remarkable innovations such as this.

Do you know of any buildings that are planning to/starting to use this material? I’d really like to keep track of it and see how the numbers pan out with it in practice.

An architect/engineer who recently visited the Galapagos noticed that the skin of a shark passing by was absolutely immaculate and wondered: how does THAT work? He then went on, as reported in a United Airlines in-flight magazine several months ago, to develop a self-cleansing building exterior. The name of the game is biomimetics, or biomimicry. Physicists who first got involved in this field, commencing with the late Benoit Mandelbrot’s “fractals” “How Long is the Coast of England?” and then Chaos Theory, have been following the potential of biomimicry for decades. The oldest adages, a la “Nature Knows Best” will prove to be the only adages worth their weight in….biomass.

We have been applying Titanium Dioxide now for seven years and the self cleaning process definitely works.We have millions of square feet treated worldwide.We apply a coating on automobiles,buildings,interior floors windows etc.You do not have to buy a new substrate, but treat what you have.AP published an article over seven years ago on the effect of TI02 on nitrous oxides,Smog eating is a fact simixsolutions.com

What a fantastic idea. I mean, i’ve heard of green house cleaning products to help the environment, but here the building (or product for sake of my analogy) is actually cleaning the environment itself. Wonderful!